Organisational structure of the Party
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The following motion was agreed by the Executive Committee at its meeting yesterday:
"The EC thanks cde Buick for preparing Terms of Reference for the committee on the organisational structure of the Party and adopts these Terms of Reference. A call for nominations to this committee is made, with a deadline of Friday, 3 November, 2017."
A. To consult the membership on the current and future organisational structure of the Party, in particular on how Party members and sympathisers can participate, including electronically, in setting priorities.B. To look at the implications, in terms of amendments to the rulebook, decision-making procedures and workload at Head Office, should the Party become a national membership organisation.
C. To submit a report to the EC in time for it to be presented to 2018 Annual Conference.
Nominations made by branches and accepted by the nominee to spgb@worldsocialism.org
This is a tough one but necessary, I would think we need to start with our existing 'problems': List them and work out what changes would emeliorate them without compromising our democracy. The more input we have the better.Are there any existing models we could look at? Models that have worked for other groups? Or are we looking into the unknown and untested?
Vin wrote:This is a tough one but necessary, I would think we need to start with our existing 'problems': List them and work out what changes would emeliorate them without compromising our democracy. The more input we have the better.Are there any existing models we could look at? Models that have worked for other groups? Or are we looking into the unknown and untested?The problems have been mentioned here: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/paid-organiser-and-other-paid-membersAs for any existing models we could look at begs the question do we really need to go down that road? And are we incapable of figuring out for ourselves what measures need to be taken to turn the party into a national membership?
The Socialist Party should eliminate the geographical requirements to become a member, and to initiate the formation of a committee to handle all the matters related to all the companion parties of the WSM .I do not think that the Companion Parties of the WSM should have had a private internal forum, they all should be accessible to the world working class.The Socialist Party must initiate a campaign to look for members and sympathizers from others countries, it looks like it is party for white Europeans only, and to look for more events that are taking place around the worldLook at the case of Puerto Rico there is not one mentioning in this forum about the situation of 3.4 millions of human being suffering the consequences of capitalism, that should have been published by the WSPUS, or the SPC .because geographically it is part of their problems, it shows that geographically and regional membership does not work, and the Puerto Ricans workers and the workers from the Virgin Islands are citizens of the USA. They are not white, they are blacks or mixed.The SLP might be dead but in their monthly letter, they have covered that particular situation. The Troskyists Party, The Maoist Parties are publishing articles every day covering the world situation, at least they are opening their mouthMost Leninists and left wings organizations have branches all over the earth. The African companion party is more active and is publishing more articles and discussions than most of the companion parties, and their website is very modern.If we continue the way we are now, we are going to get fried in our own sauce, and we will follow the same road of the SLP
Brian wrote:The problems have been mentioned here: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/paid-organiser-and-other-paid-membersThanks for the link, Brian. Perhaps the content of that thread could be copied over to this thread? A good start for the discussion.
After 100 years I was able to find one member from the Latin America geographic region and he became a member of the Socialist Party of Canada, and he has told me that he never receives any communication from the SPC. I do not see his name on the list of members. How the hell are we going to be called a World, or even an international ( within nations ) organization? He was a member of a Marxist-Leninist organization known as the ICC, which has branches in Europe, USA and Latin America, and it has more members, and he was in charge of one of their locals or branches, he was in the Leninist movement since he was a very young person, and he is a criminal defense lawyerHow the hell am I going to ask potential members to become a member of the WSM? I prefer to ask them to stay in their own organization, otherwise, they are going to get frustrated, and they will leave. Even more, they did not know that I was one of their members. Why am i wasting my time translating documents, pamphlets and articles in others languages? That member of the SPC ( in case that he is a member ) has the potentiality of forming a companion party in Latin America and it can be expanded to others countries. He has a large list of contacts, and he is always attending the meetings of others groups from the left. We have a hot potato in our hands and we do not know what to do
Why are you berating the SPGB, Marcos?; we're just one part of the WSM and we're doing the best we can with the limited human resources we have.
gnome wrote:Why are you berating the SPGB, Marcos?; we're just one part of the WSM and we're doing the best we can with the limited human resources we have.I am not berating the SPGB I am just informing you because there is not place to do that. I know what the SPGB is doing. Did you know about these issues?
gnome wrote:Why are you berating the SPGB, Marcos?; we're just one part of the WSM and we're doing the best we can with the limited human resources we have.Do you know how or why I got interested in WSM ? Because I became a member of the WSM and Adam Bucik motivated me, and we exchanged several discussions, and he sent me some literatures and the index of articles of the WSM and I read a large portion of all the articles written by the SPGB. What is the history of some companion parties of the WSM ? Members of the SPGB emigrated and they formed the companion parties
There's an expression "Think local, act global." It's vague but is it meaningless and if not, what would it mean in the context of the WSM / SPGB? Global funded organisation? Retention of local branches?
I remember back in maybe 1985/86 Newcastle Branch putting forward a motion or an item for discussion about taking the idea of the WSM more seriously and really constituting a World Movement. I think this is an ideal opportunity to discuss how we could become a member based organsation on a national and international (world basis).Part of the problem, to me anyway, is that in reality there has been a history of members who really see us as the Socialist Party of London, and who viewed anyone from Watford as being a bit suspect. Although this view became extinct with the departure of the Ashbourne Court Group, it stil has organisational echoes.We need to change the mindset and move away from seeing Clapham High Street as some kind of Socialist St Peter's.The move to a member based organisational structure and the move to consider a second premises in another part of the UK, is one of the most positive things to happen in the part for may years.
There was a group in Jamaica based on the same principles of the WSM/SPGB. How did it happen? It happened because one of its founders assisted to one of the classes provided at the SPGB Summer School. It has been the only real socialist organization that has existed in Latin America, among all the thousands of Leninist organizations that existed in that region of the earth. It was not influenced by the WSPUS or the SPC, it was influenced by the SPGBRaya Dunayevskaya said that "Marx and Engels were two individuals at the very beginning and their ideas spread around the globe", At the very beginning, they wrote a document known as the German Manifesto which later on became the Communist Manifesto.I think we can do something similar, or maybe we can do more than that, and we do not have the British Manifesto, but we have the Manifesto of the World Socialist Movement, therefore the SPGB is not only part of the WSM, it has the potentiality to become a worldwide socialist organization.The Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela was able to recruit around 6 million members in a few months,( they had the resources of the state ) and one of the founders was a member of the WSM forum ( in the Spanish language ) and I was part of her contact list. That particular groups broke away from the coalition In the USA a very strange case took place on 2016 whereas millions of peoples were willing to vote for a so-called socialist. We know that he is not a socialist, but we know about the big anti-communist campaign of the US ruling classKarla Rab from the WSPUS just died on September( according to a message published on the WSM forum ) and her death might affect the existence of that companion party. Do we have a national/international/worldly organization to face that problem? No,, we do not have it, we have separated organizations with a local mentality. The members of that particular institution might become members of the SPGB until they become stronger again because at the present time it does not exist as a political institution.Geographically that companion party must be trying to attract members from the USA and from Latin America, but they do not have the resources and the organizational platform to do that at the present time, it must be done by the SPGB which has more resources.This particular forum is very active, but we do not have too many activities at the WSM forum, and we need more activities, more discussion and more postings, and we have members which belong to other political organizations. We are boxing in our own little corner
There are plenty of free web based devices we can use, ranging from Blockchain and Ethereum:https://ethereum.org/daoThe Ethereum model is based on Liquid Democracy, or delegable proxy voting: we looked at this some years backas an option. It could be one way to preserve the branch structure informally, as it would encourage groups of members to meet to decide how to pick their delegate: certainly, we could replace the EC with delagate meetings, and move toward having delegate boards directly appointed instead of departments. Computers are useful for this, but not essential.https://liqd.net/en/software/Or more basic online voting machines are freely available:http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/Condorcet voting is a real power tool.Or, in the context of our current difficulty witha admin:http://www.spliddit.org/apps/tasksSome tasks can't be moved from HO easily (banking the cheques and cash, for one), they will always need a postal address. However, if we broke down some of the roles we're trying to fill into specific operations, that could make the work less onerous, we might be able to get more volunteers: but I slightly fear this might lead to a roata (shudders).
Young Master Smeet wrote:I slightly fear this might lead to a roata (shudders)Why the shudders, sounds like a good place to end up:https://www.lonelyplanet.com/honduras/bay-islands/roatan
What we have to do is to focus our minds in the world working class,(we do not need any complicated procedures), and establish companion parties all over the earth. Capitalism has its own expansion. socialists ideas have their own expansion too. The Russians, the Chinese, the Albanian and the Cubans expanded their own ideas around the world. The best idea is the one which is over the table to be discussed a National/International/Wordly organization.
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